Draft:Anarres

This page is about the fictional planet Anarres created by Ursula K. Le Guin and which features in her novel, The Dispossessed. For other uses, see Anarres (disambiguation).

Anarres
Created by	Ursula K. Le Guin
Genre	Science fiction
In-universe information
Type	Planet
Race(s)	Anarresti, also known as Odonians
Location	Tau Ceti

Anarres is a fictional planet in The Dispossessed, a 1974 novel by Ursula K. Le Guin. The work received both Hugo and Nebula awards and is regarded, along with The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), as one of Le Guin’s masterpieces, and a landmark in twentieth-century science fiction.

Anarres is located, together with its neighbouring planet Urras, in the solar system of Tau Ceti, a real star at a distance of just under twelve light years from Earth (or Terra, as it is referred to in the novel). Urras is the Old World: state-controlled, hierarchical, patriarchal, unequal but lush, materially rich and beautiful. Anarres is the New World: anarchist, communal, feminist, egalitarian, but arid and ecologically poor.

A century and a half before the novel opens, idealistic revolutionaries from Urras have gone into exile and settled Anarres. The dry satellite planet becomes the setting for a social experiment based on the principles of mutual aid, communalism and social equality. On Anarres, the three great barriers to human freedom as identified by nineteenth-century anarchist thinkers – the state, organised religion and private property – are absent. In an introduction to a 2017 collection of her Hainish novels and stories, Le Guin describes The Dispossessed as her attempt to write an "anarchist utopia".

Plot and narrative structure

The Dispossessed tells the story of Shevek, a brilliant Anarresti physicist, who travels to Urras to advance his scientific research. Going against the Terms of Settlement (and against the wishes of many on his home planet), Shevek wishes to re-establish contact between the "sister-worlds" of Urras and Anarres.

The novel begins with Shevek’s departure from the Port of Anarres on board the space freighter Mindful. One plotline concerns his experiences in Urras, where he is feted as a visiting scientist at an eminent university in A-Io (one of three warring powers on this planet: the others are Thu and Benbili). The other narrative strand goes back in time to relate his upbringing and coming of age on Anarres: his education, relationships and his struggle to balance personal initiative with social responsibility.

Social, economic and political organisation

On Anarres, society is organised according to principles of mutual aid, voluntary association and absolute non-coercion. Economic activity is divided into syndicates and federatives, with work postings advertised via an automated system called Divlab: the administration of the division of labour. The network of administration and management is called PDC: Production and Distribution Coordination. This (as Shevek explains to his hosts in Urras) is "a coordinating system for all syndicates, federatives and individuals who do productive work. They do not govern persons; they administrate production." ##[FIX CITATION from TD]

Pravic, the rationally devised language of Anarres, makes no distinction between the concepts "work" and "play", but the term "kleggich" refers to drudgery: the kinds of menial or manual labour that most Anarresti volunteer for one day out of every decad (the ten-day cycle which forms the weekly unit on the planet).

The portrayal of Anarres is drawn from the author’s wide research in social and political theory. Reflecting on what led her to write The Dispossessed, Le Guin remembered how the novel took shape in the aftermath of protests against the Vietnam War:

But, knowing only that I didn’t want to study war no more, I studied peace. I started by reading a whole mess of utopias and learning something about pacifism and Gandhi and nonviolent resistance. This led me to the nonviolent anarchist writers such as Peter Kropotkin and Paul Goodman. With them I felt a great, immediate affinity. They made sense to me in the way Lao Tzu did. They enabled me to think about war, peace, politics, how we govern one another and ourselves, the value of failure, and the strength of what is weak.
So, when I realised that nobody had yet written an anarchist utopia, I finally began to see what my book might be.

Geography, environment and ecology

Anarres has one continuous landmass and three main oceans (the Sorruba Sea, the Temaenian Sea, the Keran Sea). The seas have not been connected for several million years, and so their life forms have followed insular courses of evolution, with a diverse range of fish and other marine organisms.

On land, however, there are few endemic species. The planet’s climate since the settlement of Anarres has been shaped by a millennial era of dust and dryness. The long beaches of the Southeast region are fertile, supporting fishing and farming communities, but beyond the arable coastal strip are the dry plains of the Southwest: an expanse that is largely uninhabited (except for a few isolated mining towns) and known colloquially as the Dust.

Flora on Anarres are mainly spiny scrub or semi-desert species like moonthorn. The dominant plant genus is the holum tree, used to make food, textiles and paper. Old World grains and fruit trees have been imported from Urras but grow only in the higher-rainfall regions of Abbenay and the Keran Sea. In terms of terrestrial fauna there are only bacteria (many of them lithophagous) and a few hundred species of worm and crustacean on Anarres.

Man fitted himself with care and risk into this narrow ecology. If he fished, but not too greedily, and if he cultivated, using mainly organic wastes for fertilizer, he could fit in. But he could not fit anybody else in. There was no grass for herbivores. There were no herbivores for carnivores. There were no insects to fecundate flowering plants; the imported fruit trees were all hand-fertilized. No animals were introduced from Urras to imperil the delicate balance of life, only the settlers came, and so well scrubbed internally and externally that they brought a minimum of their personal fauna and flora with them. Not even the flea had made it to Anarres. ##[Fix citation for TD]

Inhabitants

##[write here about lack of 'indigenous' inhabitants, and some of the strange differences the book calls our attention to between urrasti and anarresti (as distant relatives? dressing customs, height differences, hair/hair removal)]

Settlements and decentralisation

##[section about failed decentralisation, Abbenay, how the towns are organised etc?]

The Hainish cycle and the Ekumen

The Dispossessed is the fifth book-length work in what is now referred to as Le Guin’s Hainish cycle: a loosely linked series in which the known universe was peopled by an ancient interstellar civilisation from the planet Hain.

This larger backstory is revealed late in the novel when Shevek completes his scientific research. Worried that this will fall into the hands of a militaristic state on Urras, Shevek flees to the Terran embassy. Here he places in the public domain the equations that will enable the building of the ansible, a technological device that allows instantaneous communication between any two points in the universe.

The ansible provides (in Le Guin’s other novels) the basis for a federation – sometimes called the League of All Worlds, at other points the Ekumen – that is trying to link all known humanoid societies. It seeks to understand the various paths taken by these civilisations, given different environmental parameters, different social arrangements, and even different trajectories of genetic modification and organic evolution. And so, while The Dispossessed is the fifth Hainish novel that Le Guin published, it provides the backstory to the cycle (in terms of internal chronology, it can be placed right near the beginning). ##[Repeat of main wikipedia article?]

The Terran ambassador Keng offers Shevek safe passage back to Anarres, but the novel ends before he reaches his home world, and we are left uncertain about how he will be received there, whether as hero or traitor. The Dispossessed ends as it began, with a journey that links two worlds, its structure echoing the lines from Odo that appear on her grave in Urras: "To be whole is to be part; true voyage is return." ##[Fix citation for TD]